100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know

I stumbled across this list by accident, having no knowledge of the book before now.

I knew most of the following words, but not all of them. How about you?

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The Muppets say good-bye to Jim Henson

(Source: Mark Evanier.)

So, people looking on the Amazon baby registry may have noted there’s a lot of DVDs on there for a little kid. That’s my fault. The theory is that, no matter how parents may plan otherwise, eventually the kid gets put in front of the TV for a moment, even if just to enable the parent to go to the bathroom or shower. And once there, the kid is going to imprint on something random. (Both my nieces have imprinted on Elmo in a pretty major way.) While you hope the kid imprints on, say, Stephen Colbert (who, in his own way, is as much of a cartoon as Bugs Bunny), there’s always the danger he’ll bond with Barney or the Teletubbies, those creepy Wiggles guys or those strange fundementalist Christian vegetables. (Seriously, vegetables. There’s a born-again cucumber, tomato, a whole garden full. How is it that no one finds them really odd but me? Does no one else wonder how a tomato could find Jesus?)

My plan, therefore, is to flood the channel with good stuff. Classic Looney Tunes, the Muppets (including Sesame Street, the Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock), the Dini/Pimm DC animated stuff, non-exasperating Disney movies and so on. Then, when the kid decides he needs to watch the same DVD over and over (and over and over and over), it will be slightly less painful for the parents.

That’s the theory, anyway.

And I still miss Jim Henson. He was the only celebrity whose death made me cry.

CSI: David Caruso

Twitter and text-messaging style guide

Yes, this is only the kind of thing that appeals to a hardcore writing nerd, but Grammar Girl (my new favorite podcast, even edging out the inimitable Sandra Tsing Loh) has come up with a style guide for use with Twitter and (more important for me) text-messaging: Strunk & Twite.

NaNoWriMo: Starting to plan

So, this year, I think I’m going to try and knock out a novella in a month as part of National Novel Writing Month. (The standard length really creates a novella, not a novel, but “National Novella Writing Month” wouldn’t put as many butts in the seats.) I don’t have any illusions that this will produce something publishers are going to be eager to snatch up, but I still would like to make this a good practice run for a “serious” novel attempt.

In that spirit, I’m going to do some advance planning for my piece, “The Unicorn Hunter,” periodically throughout the year. While I have the basic concept — the title almost tells it all — I’ll want a good outline ahead of time, an idea of who the characters are and some ideas of the setting.

Wendy Wheeler has a good basic outline on her site. I’ll rough something out over the next week and post it here.